


Chew

by revolutionator



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: F/F, Learning How To Eat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 08:22:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16114547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revolutionator/pseuds/revolutionator
Summary: Amethyst is a great teacher about most things, but Peridot really doesn't trust her about Earth food.





	1. Regular Old Gum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [prpl_pen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/prpl_pen/gifts).



> Thank you so much for the opportunity to write this! It's such a departure from what I normally write (which is definitely more on the angst side) but these two are so cute and funny I wanted to aim for something that honoured their interactions from the show, but you know, with kissing. I hope you enjoy it!

“Here’s the thing, Peri. You gotta figure out the stuff that’s good to eat, and the stuff they put in the food boxes is a good start, but it’s not  _ comprehensive _ .”

Peridot squinted up at her, less because of the sun (today was overcast with a real threat of rain) and more because of the growing sense of mistrust. Amethyst, she hated to admit, was very clever with regards to Earth traditions; her skill with Nintendo devices and the unwieldy garbage disposal beast were unparalleled. This eating thing, though: it didn’t sit well with her, metaphorically or literally. It didn’t sit well at all. And when she’d agreed to stay over at the house for a few days in lieu of the barn, she hadn’t expected to be enrolled in Amethyst’s crash course on the finer points of Earth cuisine.

“Stop bullying her, Amethyst,” Steven called from a little ways away. He and Connie were sparring, but in a way that clearly didn’t benefit anyone’s battle acumen. Large, swooping poses paired with screaming and flailing. It all seemed about as clumsy and fantastical as what Amethyst was talking about.

How had Steven known she was ‘bullying’ her?

“Aw, I’m just broadening her horizons. Pay attention to your LARP, Ste-man!”

The dull thud of Connie’s umbrella smacking into Steven’s head and the pained yelp that followed meant either he didn’t listen or hadn’t heard her. Probably the first. Amethyst was very loud.

She was wearing a raincoat today, a raggedy cyan garment that looked like it had probably belonged to a human man much bigger than she was. On her arm was hooked the strap of a huge canvas rucksack that Peridot thought she had seen in the barn before. She didn’t know when Amethyst had retrieved it or why.

“I don’t like eating,” she said in a grumble barely loud enough to be heard. “We’ve been through this. I can’t make the swirly holes and disposal bags inside me. It’s too hard.”

“Like, duh it’s hard,” Amethyst said, “you only just got started trying it. But you don’t have to do the whole thing right away, y’know? You can just chill with it in your mouth for a bit.”

Peridot considered this. Steven and Connie continued to make battle noises in the background. Whatever a LARP was, they were very absorbed in it. Amethyst seemed to notice her make this realization, because her mouth cracked into a wider grin.

“Here.” She plunged one arm into the canvas rucksack and retrieved a fistful of brightly wrapped packages. She hovered the hand in front of Peridot for a bit, until it became obvious that Peridot wasn’t going to cup her hands in front of her like a pleading orphan, so she just dropped all the packages in front of her in a pile. “Get a load of this.”

“What  _ is _ this?”

“It’s gum, Sherlock! The food you’re not meant to swallow? I saw it in the grocery aisle.”

“It doesn’t look very appetizing.”

Peridot kicked the pile of neon oblongs, scattering them. They didn’t scatter very far, like she hoped they would – instead a few of them kind of clumped into the others, and one of them rolled benignly along the ground until it touched Amethyst’s foot. A glance upwards revealed that Amethyst’s smile had faltered a little, with her teeth now covered by tightly-pressed lips, which made Peridot feel the most peculiar emotion since they’d left for Lighthouse Park that morning: guilt.

She scooped up one of the bright yellow blocks, running her fingers along the waxed membrane. She could feel the ‘gum’’s internal organs move and dislodge as her fingers squeezed, and then to her surprise the whole thing burst open, revealing its prone white innards. She squinted inside it. Each of its insides was split into an identical rectangular strip.

“Oh, wait, wait wait wait. You should probably take the paper off ‘til you’re used to it. Beginner’s mistake!”

Amethyst ripped one of the perfect white rectangles out and revealed that half of it was a spongy beige prong. Then she removed the white part and revealed the entire object was a spongy beige prong. Fascinating. It was times like this Peridot almost wished she could have gone into biochemistry, or livestock raising.

She watched with morbid curiosity as Amethyst tossed the rest of the packet to the ground without ceremony. That left the one exposed piece she’d plucked out. She offered it to Peridot. She didn’t take it right away. Steven and Connie weren’t screaming anymore – they were giggling.

“You afraid?” Amethyst’s eyes had a glint to them now. “Little bit of gum too much for an intrepid, intelligence-gathering gem like you?”

Before she knew what she was doing, Peridot’s hand shot out, almost knocking the gum onto the ground. It hovered in pure space for a second before her fingers closed on it, and then she shoved it into her largest face hole and let it sit there, like you were supposed to do with food.

“Whey, atta girl!”

“Fhank you.” The gum got in the way of her words. How irritating. “Mow whaff.”

Amethyst gave her a Look, capitalized because it filled her with a deep and incommunicable certainty that she was about to get Informed About Something, much like the Looks her superiors had given her back on home planet during debriefing. Instead of sweeping her hands up into a salute and starting a series of holographic slides, Amethyst put her arm around her.

“The whole point of gum,” she said in that same knowing, confidential tone, “is to chew.”

“Rhew?”

“Chew.”

Amethyst pointed at her own mouth, then rested her hands either side of Peridot’s head. She could grip her cheeks with her hands positioned that way, Peridot thought, shortly before Amethyst gripped each of her cheeks along with the underside of her jaw and squeezed so hard her teeth nearly clacked together.

“Wo-wo-woah!”

Amethyst’s grip strength was deceptive. Peridot had foolishly underestimated her vitality before, and no wonder considering Amethyst’s feeble origins; but who had spent years combating corrupted gems with a whip while Peridot had still been waiting for deployment? She should be well used to her surprising displays of strength.

Now Amethyst was making her gnash up and down in unnaturally huge bites, missing the stick of gum altogether and nearly knocking it back where a lesser creature might have a windpipe. She choked out a muffled shriek of mutiny.

“Ah, sorry. Just givin’ you a kickstart.”

“Ayoh howda choo!”

“There you go. Just grind it real good between those chompers and drain the flavor out, and then when you’re done you can spit it at a nerd!”

Peridot’s eyes narrowed.

“Or a geek, or… a cow, or something, I don’t know. How’s it taste?”

Ah, right. The other key component of food. One couldn’t neglect that.

She held her breath, trying to isolate the ‘taste’, which she understood to be synonymous to ‘flavor’ and only tangential to ‘nutrition’. It was a cold, spicy sensation, kind of like how silt felt on Homeworld beneath her feet, kind of like the cool, high frequency pitch of revving engines, but frustratingly disparate from both sensations.

“It tastes… metal…. like?”

“What? It’s lemon coated spearmint. Does it really taste like metal?”

“No, no, be quiet. I’m triangulating it.”

“You’re so weird,” Amethyst said, with obvious albeit misplaced fondness. “It tastes like, y’know, those weird yellow fruits you see everywhere. The neighborhood teens squeezed a bunch into a jug once and sold it with sugar and water and people actually paid ‘em, can you believe it? Wish I had a jug now. You’d see they taste the same.”

The area around them was newly quiet. Maybe Steven and Connie had finished playing. With a climbing sense of panic, Peridot chewed some more. She wanted to get this right. She wanted Amethyst to grin at her and offer her palm out and tell her she’d got it. That would be the right application for her strange, warm voice.

“It tastes,” she tried again, “like… Earth sunlight? It tastes how it looks. I don’t know!”

There was no time for Amethyst to react, because within seconds of Peridot’s outburst a tall, perfectly realized experience with buoyant long hair and an aura of intense euphoria crashed in between them, and then they were grabbing Amethyst’s hands and spinning her around in the air, leaving Peridot talking to no one.

She watched the two spin around in a whirl of pinks and purples, and for a half second it seemed like the pink and purple merged towards a middling shade of puce – but then they all slowed down, and Amethyst detached and fell on the floor. Peridot couldn’t tell why, but she was relieved.

The gum didn’t taste like sunlight anymore. She coughed it onto the ground. Blegh.

“You guys fused, and you didn’t tell me you were gonna?” Amethyst slapped Stevonnie’s arm, then cackled. “Nah, just kiddin’, I’m not Garnet.”

Oh, no. Stevonnie was heading in this direction, in all their mutual Steven-and-Connie-ness. She wasn’t even done feeling vaguely resentful at them interrupting her conversation. When they swept her up in their arms she ‘humphed’ dramatically until they put her down.

“You okay, Peri?”

“I’m fine. Amethyst is showing me the food that isn’t food.”

“Condiments...?”

“Nah,” Amethyst interjected before Peridot could ask for clarification, “the other one.”

“Oh! Gum.”

“Right.”

Stevonnie grinned. Peridot felt the weird, crawling lurch in her core that she used to be able to attribute to years of homeworld bigotry but had felt toothless and needy in recent weeks. Not guilt, though that was there too. Jealousy? It couldn’t be jealousy. What did Peridot have to be jealous of? Jealous of  _ Steven and Connie _ ?

Amethyst’s hand was on her shoulder. Her processors felt more churned and miserable than ever before.

“She’s getting the hang of it,” Amethyst said, “you know, ‘cuz of my excellent tutelage.”

“Ha, ha,” said Peridot, but the rollicking feeling in the basest bits of her calmed down. She leant into the hand just a bit. It felt good. It felt earned.

 


	2. Juicy Fruit

Later that night, after Steven and Connie had de-fused, after Greg drove Connie home and after Steven went to sleep, Peridot set about sneaking into the kitchen. Even on a visit, the house felt off without Steven bouncing around it; she couldn’t be loud, because one of the other gems would appear as if by magic with shushing fingers and glaring eyes.

Like they understood how hard it was to walk around in the dark, jaggedy mess of a human house! If they wanted her to be quieter maybe they could move her bathroom into one of those pocket dimension portals they all retired to when Steven was unconscious.

Not that she wanted to wake him up, now she knew that human bodies were too weak to operate without rest. She tiptoed to the hulking mass of the refrigerator and tugged its door open.

Lemon coated spearmints.

Tucked into the lowermost drawer, rolling around with similar looking but better-colored cousins, she saw them. She licked her lips. She reached out, taking care not to jostle the carefully stacked piles of canned cola and yesterday’s pizza box. Quietly, quietly…

Her fingers closed around one of the spearmints. It had a pleasant, pitted skin, but it felt tougher on the inside than she expected. Maybe they tenderized it to turn it into a gum.

“’Ey Peri, what up?”

She tore the drawer out of the fridge with her elbow, lost her balance and collapsed backwards. Upstairs, Steven rolled over and snored.

“Amethyst!”

“Yeah,” Amesthyst said, looking unruffled and effortless with it. She reached over and picked up one of the cans of cola. Popped it, let it fizz out, poured a slug of it into her mouth like Greg feeding gasoline into the van. “Midnight snack, huh? Li’l bit of citrus?”

Peridot became keenly aware of the fruit trapped in her hand and whipped it behind her back. Amethyst was grinning so widely at her that she immediately realized this was futile, so she offered it up to her like a corrupt Zircon presenting evidence.

Amethyst looked at her with the one of her eyes that wasn’t covered with fluffy hair. She took the fruit and inspected it, before tossing it into her open mouth without ceremony, swallowing it whole and letting out a satisfied belch. “It’s pretty sour for your first digestible.”

Peridot gulped.

“Well, obviously I didn’t want to digest it,” she said, though she kind of had wanted to try, a little bit. That was before she realized there was an audience. “I wanted to chew it. To match the flavors up.”

“Oh. Sure.”

Amethyst squatted next to her, where she could peer more effectively into the dislodged drawer. She dug out one of the little green fruits and another one of the yellow ones, lowballing the latter so that Peridot had to jump to her feet catch it.

“You shouldn’t throw things while Steven’s asleep,” she muttered.

“Yeah, well, if you care that much about not wakin’ Steven up you should have asked me for help opening the fridge door without clattering chunks everywhere.”

“That was  _ your _  fault,” Peridot started to snap back, but Amethyst was already cackling.

She rolled the fruit around in her hand. Lemon-coated spearmint. It had a faintly acidic smell up close, which had diluted with whatever process turned it into gum. The spicy coldness was muted. No, it wasn’t even there.

“It smells different.”

“It’s a real fruit, not gum.”

Peridot put it in her mouth. Amethyst nodded, leaning forward, which made Peridot rear back. Not shyly. She wasn’t shy. Amethyst just didn’t need to see her reactions in high definition, that was all.

“It tastes like it,” she submitted after thirty tense seconds of rolling it around her teeth, whereupon she spat it out again. “I think the gum is better.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Most people don’t usually swallow the whole lemon, so good job.”

“But you-!”

“I’m a professional,” Amethyst said grandly, rolling onto her stomach. “You can’t judge yourself by my standards or you’ll wreck yourself. ”

Peridot couldn’t think of a good reply. She watched Amethyst stretch out comfortably on the floor with her soda, as at home and squishy as an Earth kitten. Then she felt the weird pang inside again. Brutal and warm and more-ish. Amethyst caught her looking and stuck her tongue out.

“You’ll get it someday, okay? Don’t get bent out of shape just ‘cuz you can’t…uh, bend out of shape.”

“I’m not,” she said. She looked away, hot all over and with the taste of lemon-coated spearmint heavy on her tongue, nowhere for it to go. “Hey… Amethyst.”

She caught her right as Amethyst sank her teeth into the rind of the little green fruit.

“Mfh. Yeah?”

“Do you…” She spat the fruit out long ago, but it felt like it was still in her mouth. Garbling her words and making them all taste like yellowed sugar. “Do you fuse a lot? With the others?”

Amethyst’s face did a strange thing, where it looked really confused, then hurt for a couple of seconds, and then weirdly calm like she’d pulled a sheet over all the messy stuff that came before. “Don’t you hate fusion? Why do you care?”

“I don’t say I hate it anymore,” Peridot grumbled at the floor. It was easier to say to the floor than Amethyst’s face.

“Are you flirting with me?” Amethyst tossed the bitten fruit in her hand and caught it. Her eyes were wide with disbelief now. “Is that, like, what this is?”

Peridot thought about Stevonnie laughing and spinning around on the beach, and Malachite’s shrieks of anguish as she forced herself into the sea. She thought about Garnet’s outstretched hand. There was so much weight in that outstretched hand. So much promise. It was so… frustrating. Frustrating. Not scary. Not terrifying.

“Hey,” Amethyst was saying, “I was just kidding. Don’t get all sad.”

Peridot tried to say that she wasn’t sad at all, or scared, just frustrated by all of the stupid barriers she’d left back of homeworld only to run headfirst into new, even stupider barriers that Earth had either created or directly engineered. Imagine! A Peridot fusion. What would that even… Who would…

She looked into Amethyst’s one uncovered eye. Amethyst pushed her hair to the side, so she could meet both eyes directly.

“Like, I think I get it,” Amethyst said.

“How do you get it?  _ I _  don’t get it.”

“I dunno. I just get it.”

Amethyst rolled upwards then crab-walked across the floor to sit next to Peridot. Her strong, game console toting hands touched Peridot’s own, more suited to keypads and pumpkin farming. They felt gentle and nice, together like that.

“I don’t want to fuse yet,” Peridot grunted. It felt so silly to admit that, but Amethyst was nodding. “It’s too… I can’t.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you get close without fusing?”

Amethyst considered for a moment. Her fingers curled comfortably into Peridot’s palm, while her other hand drummed a syncopated beat against her knee. She didn’t consider the question for very long, which Peridot thought impressive: it was a difficult question, all things considered.

“There’s a bunch of weird stuff humans do instead of it.”

“Like Connie and Steven…?”

“Sure, but they can fuse too. The main thing they do is talk, which I hate doing, so that’s right out.”

Peridot puffed her cheeks out indignantly. “You’re talking to me right now.”

“Aw, shucks, you got me.”

Peridot tried wiggling her fingers against Amethyst’s hand. It was difficult to ease her hands into the cracks, because Amethyst held her fingers very firmly together, like she was always a moment away from making a fist; after enough insistent prodding, however, she relaxed enough to let Peridot’s fingers in. Peridot squeezed. Amethyst chuckled.

“I’m good at talking,” Peridot said. “I’m really good at it. I can talk at you if that’s easier.”

“Not how it works, small stuff.”

“You’re like, the same size as me!”

The little drum beat on Amethyst’s knee faltered and stopped. Peridot looked up at the ceiling, because it sounded like some strange accompaniment had started to replace it: but it was just the rain that had threatened to fall all day finally making good on its promise.

“I guess we can talk sometimes,” Amethyst said in a soft voice Peridot hadn’t heard in a long time. The softness made her look up, which made Amethyst look away as if in reflex. But then she looked back at her, and smiled. “Seeing as we’re doing it right now.”

“Yeah,” Peridot said. She felt a weird stirring inside of her, almost like a gurgling. For a second she was delighted - was she finally forming a human stomach, completely by accident? But then it didn’t abate, so it must have been something else. “What else?”

“Hm?”

“You said that was the main thing. That necessitates other, inferior options. I’d like to examine those as well.”

“You’re so weird, Peridot.”

“So are you.”

“Yeah,” Amethyst said.

She put her hand on Peridot’s shoulder. The rain fell outside. Steven was snoring in the background. Everything was so still Peridot could barely think, except that didn’t make sense. Of course she could still think, even with Amethyst’s hand spanning her shoulder and cupping her face. She was thinking right now. Thinking, thoughts, about the softness of Amethyst’s hand even though it was made of light, just like she was. Thoughts about how up close you could get a better vantage point to see both of her eyes.

“What are the other options?” she demanded.

“They like to do this gross thing with just their mouths,” Amethyst said.

“Like chewing? As I demonstrated earlier today, I’m highly capable of-”

“Nah,” Amethyst broke in, “not like that. Not… totally like that.”

She leant forward so far that their forms collided. Cold, sober panic washed over Peridot in a rush of endorphins - this was definitely fusion-like behavior, and that wasn’t on the table yet! She had told Amethyst as much! But then Amethyst stopped, so they were meeting only at the lips, and she didn’t go further.

Oh.

That wasn’t bad at all, actually. It felt strangely warm, and kind of embarrassing, and a little bit intimate. It wasn’t dissimilar to the strange warm feeling she’d felt around Steven and later Lapis, but it had this other element to it that she couldn’t place.

“I like that,” she said against Amethyst’s mouth. “This isn’t an inferior option at all.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think it sucks either.”

Amethyst pressed herself against her again, coming towards her from a different angle, but she paused before making contact.

“You know, you should open your mouth, too.”

“I knew that.” She hadn’t.

Amethyst giggled through her nose. Before Peridot knew what was happening, she was the one pushing against her face, mouth open, tongue moving, and mercifully Amethyst moved her head just in time to catch her. Peridot had misjudged how much force was necessary, so both of them went toppling to the floor; Amethyst shapeshifted a couple of sizes bigger to soften the sound, then shrank back to normal.

Now Peridot’s hand was on Amethyst’s shoulder instead, with the other one pressed up against her cheek, and Amethyst was on the ground beneath her, looking equal parts smug and strangely, desperately earnest. It was a lot stranger than Peridot expected to have Amethyst beneath her, and to have her looking up at her like that. She sympathized with her earlier complaints about talking, now. What were you supposed to say to a gem when you were both in this weird situation?

“Not bad.”

“Shut up,” Peridot grumbled, leaning down.

They met in the middle. This time Amethyst chewed on her lower lip a little, which also felt good, and Peridot squeezed Amethyst’s shoulder like she’d done before, and that felt good as well. When they broke apart this time Amethyst had Pearl’s face.

“Ugh! Don’t do that.”

Amethyst stuck Pearl’s tongue out and shifted back. “Your face! Wow, I wish I’d had my phone.”

“At least I  _ have _  the right face on. I don’t want to do this with Pearl.”

“Cool,” said Amethyst. She looked delighted to hear this. “So, like… Is it cool if we do this again? Like, in the future.”

Peridot thought about it for a bit. Her hand wiggled around awkwardly until Amethyst caught it in mid-air and gripped it tight.

“I think,” Peridot said, “I’d like to do that. In the name of exploring unique and Earthbound experiences.”

“Cool,” Amethyst said again. “And hey, you’re doing great at that whole chewing gum thing. You’ll be swallowing lemons whole in no time.”

“Which part of the gum is that?”

“It’s the fruit.”

Peridot squinted and then nodded. She would ask about the spearmint part when she was feeling less off-kilter and giddy. Come to think of it, she was feeling like that a lot around Amethyst as of late. Maybe she would ask Stephen or Lapis instead.

“There isn’t any fruit on Homeworld, you know. I’m actually starting to think we got the raw end of the deal, planet-wise.”

“Earth is pretty great, yeah.”

Peridot stared at her, narrow-eyed. “You’ve never said that before.”

“Yeah, well, you make explaining it kinda...fun?”

That was somehow the most embarrassing thing either of them had said yet, so Peridot was almost relieved when Amethyst dramatically turned into a large, Amethyst-faced lemon and rolled about amongst the mess of fruit on the floor.

She scooped her up along with the lemons and off-color lemons, then dropped them all when Amethyst resumed her original shape and sent her plummeting back to the floor again. That noise was loud enough that the kitchen appliances rattled, and Stephen’s sleepy voice called out into the dark, and so both of them wordlessly realized this little tryst was over.

“Night, Peri,” Amethyst whispered before disappearing back into her room.

Peridot waved at her as she left. Was that what you were supposed to do? She would ask Stephen about that too, or Lapis; yikes, she really hadn’t thought this through. If flirting was what she was doing, should she go through with it in a Gem way or an Earth way? Which would make Amethyst more comfortable? Which, more importantly, would make Peridot look and feel like less of an idiot?

She caught her reflection in the refrigerator as she was putting the fruit away and saw that she was grinning so hard that she was nearly unrecognizable.

“Aw, who cares,” she announced to her reflection. “Chewing faces is ‘way awesome’, as Earth creatures would put it, and I’m going to get  _ real _  good at it.”

“I’m happy for you, Peridot,” came Steven’s sleepy voice from the level above.

Oh.

“Ahhh… Yeah. Good night,  Steven.”

“G’night.”

“Real good at it,” she hissed at her reflection one more time for good luck. That was a great new objective in this new uncertain state of things. Maybe honing her face-mashing skills would even help her learn how to swallow, someday.

Maybe.


End file.
